A Paradise, One Beautiful Picture (Lee Seon-young, Art Critic)

Among palm leaves hung down like a curtain and over land with a clear view between them, an elephant walks, a metaphor for the artist exploring the truth. Through the exhibit Elephant Seeking the True Nature, Hye-shin Park portrays an elephant traversing open land where blue palm trees grow under blue sky seeking utopia. But, we are not confident the land is the space where ‘all our nature’ is embodied. Like the proverb “As a blind man touches an elephant,” the meaning of the elephant in her work is not as certain as it might seem. The elephant walks thoughtlessly on instinct in a gridded space where a ground of paper is revealed, as it is. The artist projects herself as one who wanders, looking for true nature, onto the elephant. However, Park considers such true nature may not exist, and the endless searching for the true nature may actually be true nature. This is nothing but a ceaseless process of self-discipline or asceticism.

The way is blind in contemporary society, where folks try to look for the fastest way to the truth through efficiency, rationality, and progress. To this, an elephant, a character that goes on a journey to the truth might seem somewhat rigid and naïve. A weighty gravity is sensed in its trudging, dragging its trunk across the earth. The elephant is one of the largest organisms on earth except for the likes of trees. It seems to shoulder the heavy weight of reality, considering elephants in reality are exploited for labor and tourist inducement.

One or two elephants make a journey. The two elements, reminiscent of lovers, a couple or family, never sit down. They keep walking as if they might die at the moment they sit. The elephant emerged in a dream that Maya, the birth mother of Gautama Buddha, dreamed, and animal characters seeking truth often appear in Oriental scriptures, but the elephants and palm trees in her works on display at the exhibition, arranged in diverse ways, get inspirations at a resort.

Unlike a vast stage that looks like a window, palm trees appear confused due to an overlap. They offer an infinite scene, lending primal chaos and vitality to a rather static scene. Disturbing our view, the palm trees are painted in ink, excluding other colors, unlike the elephants and the sky on the background. Although they are exotic, the palm trees look like willow or bamboo trees as they are drawn only in ink. To the artist who majored in Oriental painting, ink is the ‘color that turns out when mixing all colors’ and is close to nature in that it excludes any artificial color. Ink is above all associated with true nature as a symbol of a ‘wise color,’ but its entangled, mixed state does not show true nature with ease - like Baroque drapes with infinite wrinkles have no core like an onion or traditional Russian dolls. Wrinkles just keep folding and unfolding.

Park always encounters difficult situations exploring true nature. The paradise the elephants look for is also two-sided. South East Asia and the South Pacific islands have been known as paradise images; as places early developed as tourist destinations. People used to leave for these areas regarded as paradises to become the first lovers, Adam and Eve. The artist joined them and went there, but she experienced deep vanity in places where you have to feel happy unconditionally and human desire becomes vain. This paradise scene is not a mere representation of her individual experience or fact. A scene per se looks imaginary with the combination of many codes from many resorts. There are lots of good factors constituting a picture here but no more than her previous pieces. The grid structure of the ground underlines virtuality. The grid is conducive to unfolding an optical space instead of the primal earth’s qualitative, gentle tactility. A net spreading like a coordinate system in cyberspace akin to a perspectival representative space is not discovered in real nature.

The lines regularly divided give an illusion of a horizon. Light, another linear element found in Mother Nature, spreads like ink in part of the sky. The grid is rendered rigidly but symbolizes vague space. The grid even looks precarious like bars, when considering difficulties in ‘discovering true nature’. An elephant seems to resent God who does not give it an answer to its wandering truth-seeking, sending its trunk heavenward. Is there utopia at the end of the vanishing point? In the Renaissance, did people think God was at the vanishing point, while a man of omnipotent power governing our view was located at the opposite? Park has often employed straight lines to represent space not only for works on display at the exhibition, but works exhibited in her previous shows. Such symbolic representation derives from her self-consciousness as one who resides within contemporary mechanical civilization and her childhood memory of the chessboard pattern of her house.

According to the artist, this representation is “order and challenge,” provoking an “oppressive, surrealistic” feeling. It creates a vague space like a desert without any specific landmark, engendering the attribute of an illusion like a mirage. Such perspectival space often turns to a theatrical stage for generating enigmatic mystery in paintings by surrealist painters such as Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Paul Delvaux, and Giorgio de Chirico. Perspective is an archaic device but may symbolize the infinite. Unlike her grid land, the sky in her painting has some color: if grids and leaves are in the sphere of line in Park’s painting, the sky is in the arena of color. Park discovered she was in air of 100% oxygen and the air may have color in the transparent, light sky of Maldives for which she left for her honeymoon in 2008. Her skyscape reflects this also. The blue sky and water is symbolic of blessed nature. After enjoying some commercial entertainment and leisure activities on the water, she also felt boredom, and realized the closeness between life and death after witnessing a drowning accident. Contradictions in reality such as boredom and death were there even in paradise.

An Oriental painting per se often depicts a paradise, but the mythology of the golden age is innate in Park’s works, employing pictorial devices of all ages and countries. She hopes, as she mentioned in her statement, that “Man could be in true, harmonious relationships with sincere, harmonious humans as in Tostoevski’s Golden Age.” There is a utopia in her work projected onto nature. Human history is a history of ceaseless progress to the expansion of productivity and capacity, but the loss of balance and harmony between man and nature has been high-priced. Therefore, we humans have always created images of harmony between man and nature in our imagination. A paradise is usually represented as an island symbolic of pure space-time severed from complicated daily life. A tourist attraction with a seashore or region comprised of isles is a perfect place where all can interchange, symbolizing uncontaminated ancient immaculacy and innocence. A paradise image like a blue island is found in her painting featuring palm trees in a background of blue sky and with an open view.

A palm tree is a reminder of an oasis in the desert, and an oasis has been a paradigm of paradise alongside the Garden of Eden. The Tree of Life or Wisdom grows in the center of the Garden of Eden. The thick leafed trees in Park’s paintings are emblematic of the completeness and abundance found in a primal utopian state. The sky in her painting reflects diverse weather conditions, but the geometrical grid on the ground signifies ever-changing spatiality and temporality. There is no sign there, but it is a space governed by repetitions trying to return to the status quo. Park’s pictures have four elements in common, and an illusion of animation-like movement is sensed as if seeing many pieces at the same time. Despite this factor, elephants appear to march in place in this space of eternal recurrence. It is usually presumed a paradise is in the far away past or future. The paradise has a sacred time different from any history or concept of temporal time. Religious historian Mircea Eliade argues that this lies in ‘an eternal moment’ (illud tempus) that has no concept of period.

While the notion of lineal time is typical in modern and contemporary times, cultural areas around the world pursued the concept of circulating time: the endless cycles of creation, completion, decline, extinction, and renewal. Eliade points out that the Arcadian paradise myths distinctively have the concept of endlessly circulating time and space in common. A paradise, the beginning and center of the world is implied in Park’s paintings, suggestive of something beyond the vanishing point. According to Jean Campbell

Thomas More’s Island of Utopia is placed in a specific place outside the world. Cooper points out a paradise is always closed from the outside and open only toward heaven. Such space is antithetic to nature. The uniform ground of Park’s work is symbolic of nature where anxiety and fear are curbed, and simultaneously continues to a magical childhood space. The space of pure volume excludes any horror from contact. This comfortable space weakens the social state while strengthening passivity. This overlaps with the idea of the golden age free from any labor. Richard Harris quotes Ovid’s description of the golden age in Paradise: “Without hoeing or spading, food is produced by itself, and only spring that warm breezes stroke self-flourishing flowers continues.” However, the golden age came to end, and abundance can be achieved only by human labor.

The atmosphere is utopian in Park’s painting with a lurid sunset in the sky. For Richard Harris, the west is overwhelmingly regarded as the location of a paradise. “Poets engulfed by an extremely beautiful Western sky at sunset see the West as the world of light and glory.” (Thomas Bulfinch) Paradise is a place where nature’s blessing is promised and eternal spring is guaranteed. Harris quotes the world-view of an ascetic sect of ancient Judaism: “There is no snow, rain, or strong heat, and only gentle western breezes from the sea making air fresh.” In the paradise humans do not bear the heavy burden of life, but live in an agreeable environment, meeting gods. Only mild, warm weather eternally continues in the paradise where there is no storm, severe heat, or bitter cold. The wind is gentle and fresh, and the light of heaven shines down on the paradise.

As the title of Thomas More’s book On the Best State of a Republic and on the New Island of Utopia indicates, the island ‘utopia’ is a “no place land”. Utopian thought is not nihilism but an alternative world-view to criticize a non-ideal reality. More’s utopia is designed by the hopes of humans who pursue things not completed yet, and freedom. In Ideology and Utopia, Karl Mannheim shows the dialect between ‘topia’ and ‘utopia’. If ‘topia’ (topie) is an all existing order in reality, the ideal is utopian in that it brings about a shift in history. All historical events, including art history, are the process all topia (order) being replaced with utopia. Utopia is none other than the transcendence of reality destroying all pre-existing orders. Utopian society is the product of exotic imagination. A longing for others appears as a truth-seeker represented as an animal in Park’s work. Since Gauguin, who left for an exotic island paradise after struggling in a modern society that brought about liberation and oppression, paradise has assumed the role of returning art language to the primal. In the Right to Dream, Gaston Bachelard, who saw the color of paradise in pictures by modern painters, remarks that paradise is above all a beautiful picture. Such a work returns us to the greatness of the origin.

In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch tried to elucidate utopian elements appearing in the field of art, creating the concept of ‘vorschein’ as an aesthetic category. For Bloch, daydreams and fantasies have utopian elements. This means all works of art and philosophy present some scenes newly formed through utopia. As “things unconscious of come across” in human soul, “things unattained” are created in the world. Bloch argues we have to admit an incessant impulse towards aspects of utopian society. That is, our impulse and enthusiasm for peace, freedom, and bread makes us pursue something realizable, lending tension to our lives. A utopia gives an unexpected present to one who aspires to search for it even though it may not exist. If that is true nature, we discover this true nature in works of art seeking utopia.

Artist Statement (HyeShin Park)

An elephant leaves to search for a utopia. The elephant wanders over a vast space with its massive body. Where is its utopia? Is it the vast land with blue palm trees? Or, the space where all our true nature is embodied? The elephant at times enjoys wandering without destination, or rushes toward somewhere. When its mind remains peaceful while walking, the elephant can meditate. If in meditation, the elephant can grasp the true nature of the world. And, if the elephant discovers the true nature of the world, its life could be delightful. The elephant could be in true, harmonious relationships with sincere, harmonious humans as in Tostoevski’s Golden Age. The elephant keeps walking to that place that we do not know where it is and may be nowhere.

Is the true nature the elephant explores life per se? Childrearing seems to be in somewhere between an unknown wild and calm relaxation. I do not ask the meaning of life any longer. The weight of quotidian life falls reverently. If a baby elephant asks this question, I’d like to reply that the answer is in your life.